Saturday, 17 November 2012

Interesting blog bits

The publisher describes Eamonn Butler’s “Friedrich Hayek” as “a breath of intellectual fresh air”. I concur, for Butler is refreshingly easy to read. He is a brilliant communicator and needs to be to compress Hayek’s many volumes of his lifetime’s writings into 146 pages and hold his readers’ attention. Scholars familiar with Hayek’s works and general readers exposed to them for the first time will find much here worthy of their attention.

Want to know what dangerous fantasies inhabit Labour activists’ minds? Wonder no longer, as all the dopy policy remits activists have dreamed up for consideration at this weekend’s Hard Labour conference have now been published online.

Are poorly-educated immigrants’ kids dragging native classmates down? Or do schoolchildren push themselves when new, smarter immigrants join their class? This column argues that although child immigrants may sometimes bring down native minorities, on the whole, poorly educated natives upgrade their education in response to new immigrants in the classroom.

Tim Harford (of ”Undercover Economist” fame) writes in the Financial Times (16 November): “How Adam Smith could help the Church” “Laurence Iannaccone, an economist who has specialised in the economics of religion, developed an idea he drew from the writings of Adam Smith: that more competitive religious marketplaces lead to more dynamic churches.”

It's not crazy to argue for the combination of a lower alcohol excise tax and a minimum per-unit price for alcohol if harm-causing drinkers disproportionately choose the cheapest plonk while moderate drinkers choose more expensive drinks.